Kate O'Brien: A Writing Life (review)

Among the contemporary critical issues in Irish Studies that emerge in Eibhaear Walshe's new biography of Kate O'Brien's "writing life" is the question of what, exactly, makes an author an Irish writer, as opposed to being merely a writer in Ireland. Walshe traces the central themes in O'Brien's novels—oppressive family life, religion, identity, sexuality, the struggle out of poverty, and especially, her idealization of Irish middle-class bourgeois life—which differentiate her from other Irish writers. Walshe contends that, in treating these subjects, O'Brien subverted the cultural and literary conventions that prevailed during her lifetime. Considering the literary company that flourished during O'Brien's active career (roughly the middle half of the twentieth century), her subversiveness is quite remarkable, and as a body of critical opinion develops around her work, Walshe's biography will no doubt become an essential starting point for many future critics.

The biography encourages a revival of interest in O'Brien's fiction, and also offers a view of the ongoing project of recovering and critiquing women writers. Irish feminists, and more generally, students of feminism and Irish literature, will find this biography useful for its discussion of cultural conventions and codes that reflect either idealized versions of the middle-class Irish bourgeoisie, or, ironically, its "unseemly" alternatives, which may account for the melancholic, indeed, elegiac tone that Walshe emphasizes in O'Brien's novels. Moreover, these plangent qualities are central to her subversiveness: they actually reflect a modernist sensibility while appearing, on the surface, to feed the popular need for romantic fiction. Once again, in Ireland all bets on genre are off.

Walshe provides a thorough account of O'Brien's conservative Catholic education with the nuns of Laurel Hill, which began when she was only five, after her mother's untimely death; O'Brien portrays love between women not as painful or tormented, but as positive, mentoring, and affirming. On the other hand, O'Brien's protagonists are preoccupied with their own moral and imaginative identities as women, often finding isolation or loneliness as central to its growth. Walshe contents that while she would privately honor the nuns of Laurel Hill and the education they gave her, O'Brien paradoxically contradicts the religious authority of her education in her fiction. Ambivalence appears to be a theme of its own for O'Brien. Her fixation on isolation and self-exile reflects her intense interest in location in her novels, which relate to her own experiences in Limerick, Connemara, and Spain. Alongside the pervasive sense of loss associated with exile, themes of sexuality, and religion also invite critical analysis in her work. So, too, does the banning of her 1936 novel Mary Lavelle by the Irish Censorship Board. This, as well as the subsequent ban of The Land of Spices (1941), dramatically affected her relationship with political Ireland—a topic not central to her fiction before, but meaningful to her continuing sense of location outside of Ireland.

O'Brien's sense of cultural and rhetorical location is of particular interest. Walshe suggests that O'Brien's narratives focus on and experiment with the unity of time and place, and in this way she uses Joyce as touchstone. She was an extraordinarily prolific reviewer, which contributed to her sense of literary convention. In reviews, O'Brien adored Samuel Beckett's Murphy and panned the overbearing sense of tradition she found in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. Always literary in her sensibilities, she fills her work with intertextual references. Walshe looks closely at ways in which O'Brien's characters reflect both subtle and dramatic examinations of cultural conventions and "code shifting" of the rhetorical locations from which they speak.

Like any writer, O'Brien's personal life and her social circle interacted with her literary creations. Generally, Walshe makes helpful literary and social connections. However, he occasionally makes sensational claims that gives a...